


There Will Be Water

by Merixcil



Category: Logan - Fandom, X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 22:20:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10580664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: For ten days, Laura had a father.





	

For ten days, Laura had a father. She never quite learns how to process that he was ever there, that he was ever more than smoke rising on the horizon of her past. Sometimes she wakes in the night with the taste of whiskey hot on the back of her tongue, though she’s never touched a drop herself. It’s always bitter and sad and lacking in comfort. It reminds her of him, in the worst possible way.

“It’s got water.” Laura tells herself every time she has to bury someone. Even when there isn’t water, when Rebecca loses the battle with dehydration in the belly of a dried out river. Their canteens are all but empty, they are miles from any lake. But everyone cries, and so there’s water. It carries them out to sea, to a place where the troubles of their present no longer matter and tears are lost below the waves.

The pass is long behind them by then, the green of the forest flashes behind her eyes. Something beautiful and impermanent. Perhaps, when they finally get to Eden it will have trees and flowers. They can sit together in the garden, however many of them make it, and there will be no need to look over their shoulders in search of something hiding in the dark. Laura remembers the killing, the blood, claws shattering skulls and ripping skin, she doesn’t get to forget that. But when she thinks of the forest that’s not her clearest memory.

She remembers tired eyes, at peace. The dull certainty of finding the lake and knowing it would be there that they would have to dig the hole. The blue skies, the quiet, how cool it was when they were out of the sun. It had been so calm, a piece of the growing earth. She dreams of it some nights, high definition colour spilling across the black of the night. In the forest she is free to run, to scream, to laugh and cry, and the figures watching her from the shadows bear her no ill will.

Ten days is not enough time to get to know someone, it’s barely enough time to form an impression of who they are when they are not standing in front of you. It takes Laura years and years to wrap her head around that, the idea that you can change the parts of you on display depending on who’s watching. Like camouflage, standing back, watching people from afar and seeing how they cope with all the little pieces of a person that they can’t see. Luckily for Laura, she had years to get to know that side of her father. Through the fading colours of comic book pages he saves the world, saves the future, saves his friends. He said it didn’t happen like that, she doesn’t believe him.

Of course, she hadn’t known he was her father when the nurses first slid her an X-Men comic. Looking back, Laura thinks they might have been trying to be kind, they might have been going behind the doctors’ backs to bring her something nice. But they had drugged her and beaten her and watched her squirm the very next morning so how can she be sure? At the time, it was just another thing that happened to her. One day she was expected to lie on a gurney while faceless men took blood samples, the next day she was supposed to kill Marines for sport. One day there was no comic, the next day there was.

No one ever taught her ‘thank you’, everything is either given or withheld. The world is black and white. Unless it’s green, or red. When Charles had panicked trying to save their skins, colours hadn’t meant anything anymore, bleeding into each other and transforming into sound before her eyes. Laura’s muscles cramp in sympathy with the person she used to be, the one that had crawled across a hotel carpet despite the way the walls were closing in on her, and slashed throats to survive.

Laura’s killed people, bad people, but bad is just a label. Rictor thinks she’s wrong about that, he sees the world in shades of good. When you kill someone who is not good, you don’t become any less good yourself. That’s his theory.

But Laura’s disembowelled people on the off chance that they were not good, and she’s been just as quick to dismember men she knows are bad. She’s going to live with it, because Logan lived with it, and he made it look so hard but she knows she can make it look easy.

The world had looked so lovely from the pass. The trees, the river, the scarred land stretching off to the horizon. Laura had still been grieving, and the idea that something could be lovely when every memory she had of it was awful moved her. She thought her father would appreciate that. He wouldn’t say as much, but he’d appreciate it.

Not every memory she has of America is awful in its own right. But even the best ones are tainted. The family table where she had tasted sweetcorn and watched Charles and Logan be a family is covered in blood. There’s water in the forest. It’s spilling from the pipes that someone has come along and burst just to make life that bit harder. The lake is lovely, and Charles is in the ground and Logan is trying not to cry. Laura reaches out to touch her father because of something she saw in a film nearly one hundred years old. It’s got water, there’s always water.

The road ahead of them is unclear and dark, so Bobby lights the way with flashes of lightly spooling from his fingertips. People have always underestimated Bobby, because his wide eyes make him look scared and he doesn’t look like he should be able to run. But he’s not scared, and he can outrun all of them. Electricity cracks across his cheeks when he’s angry, strikingly beautiful against his dark skin.

People underestimate them all. Lizard Boy because they think he has the mind of a beast, Delilah because her laugh sounds too warm to ever turn cold, Charlotte because they forget what the forest can do to them when disturbed, Rictor because he seems to noble to turn against them. As for Laura, she’s a little girl. No one thinks a little girl is going to kill them, not that quickly.

It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thought of Rebecca anymore, only that they all remember her as something alive and breathing. There were many other children back in Mexico, she’s not the first one they’ve lost.

The land is barren heading north, the sun is punishing. Rictor cracks the earth to find streams beneath the surface but there’s not always anything down there. Sometimes he finds a spring that burns so hot even Laura can’t stand the scaling heat on her skin. On days like that they have to go thirsty. It’s not the first time for any of them, they can manage. And if they don’t, there will be water waiting for them when they die.

Laura obsesses over lakes for years and years, quite possibly forever. She’s grown before she sees the great lakes on the border between America and Canada, but they affect her just the same as when she is fifteen, or twelve, staring out across the water and wondering if this will be the last thing she ever sees. She can still feel Logan under her palm, warm skin, dried blood, more hair than anyone she’s ever met. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t move. Not till one of the others comes to get her, because they have more important things to be doing than remembering dead fathers.

Charles had told her Logan was dying, he had told her not to let him. Laura doesn’t know if she did what he asked or not. Logan is dead, but it wasn’t her fault, she doesn’t think she could have stopped him from slipping away. If a method to save him had presented itself she would have taken it, the best she could do was an adamantium bullet to the back of not-Logan’s head. The thing in his bones had been poison. It had made him strong, but it had killed him in the end.

If ten days is no time at all then Laura knew Charles like a river knows a mayfly. The clearest memory she has of him is his bad accent as he struggled to find the words in Spanish to communicate with her. He was so desperate to understand, and for her to understand in kind. The first time someone had looked at her and saw her potential as something she could own.

If Logan was Laura’s father, and Charles was Logan’s father, Laura supposes that makes Charles part of her family as well. She’ll leave the albino out of it, he doesn’t count, even if she can’t blame him for struggling to survive as he did.

There are so few people in Canada. It’s a wasteland, littered with the bones of empires past. The husks of long dead cities, the cracked spine of a motorway. They try to stay away from places like that. Where there are scavengers, this is where they accumulate, but sometimes hunger or curiosity proves too powerful to hold them back.

Charlotte’s hands twitch nervously in the presence of skyscrapers, instinctively hunting for any plant life that might sustain her. The cities have been abandoned long enough that nature has begun to take back what it is owed, no trees bursting through the pavement just yet, but a city in spring is a flood of colour brought on by blooming flowers.

The shops are always emptied out, but they go hunting through them just the same. They find animals and families, wrecked carcasses of businesses past. Sometimes they steal something from someone, sometimes they kill people for food. Passing through a small town, Laura is thirteen years old and looking at the blood bubbling up from the neck of a boy not much older than her. Her stomach cries out to be filled, and she very nearly gives in to its demands. She was made a monster, why not drink the blood of the innocent?

Laura will grow old with Logan leaning over her shoulder, grabbing her arm, hissing “not okay” and not expecting her to understand. Every time she steps over the lines he drew for her. Sometimes she listens, some days it’s the best advice anyone's ever given her.

She hangs back all the way up the pass, because she’s crying and she doesn’t want the others to know how much water there is in the world. She wants her ten days back, she wants to do it better this time. She’s going to respond when Charles tries to speak to her, she’s going to wrap herself around Logan and never let go.

The forest is calm beneath her, there are no more guns in the valley. Perhaps, one day, when she’s old enough to make the trip alone, she’s going to come back here to sit by the lakeside. She’ll add stones to the cairn, she’ll make another cross, she will know there aren’t enough years in all the calendars on this earth to turn an adamantium skeleton to dust.

Or perhaps she’ll forget this place and move forward. Sometimes ten days is just ten days, and a father is just another person out to disappoint you. Laura’s never had much need to look to the future, she doesn’t have much practice making plans, but she doesn’t think she’d going to forget this. Not unless the sun scorches the plains so deep that the water dries up completely.

She reaches the pass all by herself, and catches a glimpse of the others waiting for her on the other side. There’s no more time for last looks over her shoulder, she spent them all on the cross that was really an X. Closing her eyes, Laura sees green, feels something lurking in the trees. She’s not scared of it, but then again she was never scared of much. Her palm prickles at the touch of the hair from her father’s arm and sweetcorn is the best thing she’s ever tasted. There is peace in this place, in this life. What a difference ten days can make.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this after I first saw Logan back on opening weekend but it's taken a while to get through my posting schedule. I'm not familiar with Laura or Logan as comic book characters, but the film really moved me. 
> 
> Comments are love.


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